Israel Should Look Beyond the Two-State Solution

For the past 24 years, both the U.S. and Israel have been wedded to the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, an idea that has been endorsed officially by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations. Giora Eiland argues that, given the evident failure of this plan, the time is ripe for Israel, in concert with the incoming American presidential administration, to give serious consideration to the alternatives:

[The two-state solution] is based on four assumptions. One, the solution to the conflict should be geographically restricted to the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Two, the solution requires the establishment of a Palestinian state with full sovereignty. Three, the border between Israel and Palestine should be based on the pre-1967 lines. Four, the West Bank and Gaza must constitute a single diplomatic entity.

These four assumptions create very limited room for negotiations. . . . If we free ourselves from them and try to look into the entire range of possible solutions, we will find that some of the other solutions have outstanding advantages over the only solution currently on the table. . . .

Among the other solutions, we can talk about a “regional solution” with land swaps between four players—Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Palestine—or about the creation of a federation between Jordan and the West Bank, or about a functional, not necessarily territorial, division between Israel and the Palestinians. And yes, even the plan advanced by Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party, to annex Area C [of the West Bank, where most of the Jewish settlements are concentrated] and establish Palestinian autonomy in the remainder of the territory.

 

Read more at Ynet

More about: Israel & Zionism, Naftali Bennett, Peace Process, Two-State Solution, U.S. Foreign policy

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society